Like many of us, Compagnone was born in the Neapolitan alleys, where nature runs riot and man’s reason is his sexuality, his conscience, his hunger. Still young, and as handsome and lively as an ancient god, he rebelled against all of it. Fascism, like an ideal incubator, warmed and encouraged his rejection of it and much else. And in the humiliation of the war, he discovered himself to be a Marxist, and therefore a new man, and for a moment, together with his contemporaries, he had wept the sweet tears of one who believes that he has been saved. He seemed to all of us, in his cold enthusiasm, to be a true revolutionary, and we believed that, having conquered Mother Nature, he had safely arrived in the land of reason.
When Sud folded, Compagnone’s grief was sincere and his emotion palpable, as if someone profoundly dear to him had died. But just as at some funerals, while the procession is moving through the streets, the deceased’s most devoted friends are distracted—one straightens the handkerchief in his jacket pocket, another stares at the display in a store window, another chitchats, and still another peers at his watch—so such distractions and idiocies soon appeared in Compagnone’s manners and his intelligent face. He continued to host the surviving members of the Sud group, first and foremost the pale, silent Sardinian Prunas, and to mourn the journal’s premature end, but he couldn’t hide an excitement and a joy that, strange as it seems, were directly related to that defeat. In other words, ancient nature, which for a time had tolerated the young man’s revolutionary activity, suffering the torments of a mother whose son is rebellious, was now with infinite caution suppressing his exultation and reassuming her dominance. She held up a mirror of excellent workmanship to the Marxist Neapolitan in which the story of the Sud group, rather than reflecting the imperceptible and terrifying battle between reason and nature, appeared to portray, as in one of those beloved nineteenth century variety shows, the innocent conflict between the dreams of youth and the overwhelming logic of things. The terms here were reversed. Nature alone was capable of reason, and rebellious thought was placed with the decorative and ephemeral things of beauty on this earth, like pears and apples hanging from eternal branches. As a consequence of his new subjugation to the Neapolitan mystery, Compagnone felt the need to revisit as frequently as possible his and our past, examining all that seemed to him contaminated by that new, dark urge to live, which he deemed folly. Having determined that at the heart of our relationships was the Fascist Student Center on Largo Ferrandina, which had simply been an occasion to bring us together, he found that his goal had been reached, and he recognized in us and in himself the older generation. Going deeper into his analysis, he discovered that we were useless. Our lives appeared to him as if in the caves of Lethe: a swirl of souls, restless ghosts upon nature’s deep waters. He perceived Naples and us to be in direct conflict. His relationship to the Party remained, on the surface, intact, but inside that, too, was collapsing. What he liked about the Party was that bit of the chaotic and the colorful that Marxist doctrine had taken from its interaction with our regions, but he was afraid of seeing Marxism wind up under the great dome of a new church, a modern cathedral, where the Neapolitans, worshipping their virtues instead of their vices, would no longer be Neapolitans. In this absurd situation, the former revolutionary, ensconced in the reaction, summoned Party members and rebels alike and began to insult them all, and they lowered their heads and wept. Communists or liberals, we were still Neapolitan communists and liberals, and we loved him too much not to see his insults as the rage and sadness of the sea. Furthermore, we were all weak and maimed. He told each of us our faults, exposed our wounds. That one killed himself, this one was about to, that one stole, this one had been robbed. He was truly like our land, our common mother, the city we had wanted to conquer, and he reminded us of our weaknesses and our shame, so that we would never again dare to rise up against it. He was this, and he was also its son, the son of this land, and as such denied himself forever.
In the literary pages of the local papers, and also in the journal Il Borghese,* these cries became increasingly frequent and shrill. No one was spared. He obeyed two exigencies simultaneously: to destroy first our souls and then his own, for having wounded ours. He attacked old and new religions, his own family, and the young writers from Voce; he attacked the radio as a government apparatus, and those who were opposed to the radio. He declared a state of madness and general lack of intelligence, but without sympathy, without hope of a resurrection, instead almost taking pleasure in all that resembled silence, monotony, death, the end of reason.
He was consumed by this passion. He honed it, and, by dint of long and diligent study, tried to make it more beautiful and attractive. Voltaire and Flaubert became his idols, and he sought in them new ways of bringing his compulsion to offend to the level of an art. But it happened that the city, those places both old and new that he had wanted to tear apart, became accustomed to this phenomenon, and the enemies he had hoped for disappeared. Instead, people became bored, and this distressed him more than the earlier tears and anger. In the indulgent and affectionate smiles of people he had intended to torture, he saw the ability to get used to anything, the ancient impassivity toward insult and pain, which forms the essence of Naples, and so he saw the uselessness of insults or wounds. He felt the same terror as one who has flung himself at a puppet swinging from a tree and suddenly discovers that it is not a puppet but the corpse of a hanged man, and he feels something around his own neck and realizes that he himself is hanging from the branch of a tree. He continued to laugh, but his laughter rang false.
Around the same time, while playing soccer in the courtyard of his building with some friends, Luigi hurt one of his knees. It didn’t seem to be anything serious, but a few months later they were talking about synovitis. The leg was put in a cast. When the cast came off, the leg was slightly shorter than the other one, enough to throw his youthful figure off balance and to cause him profound anxiety. He also began to experience early signs of arthritis, which soon spread to his hands, slightly altering their shape. He continually looked at them and could think of little else. Even with his friends, both the political and the literary types, he could speak only of his ailments and despised anyone interested in things other than health and physical training. He regained a kind of superficial interest in the Communist Party, raising many hopes throughout the federation, but it passed as quickly as it came. During this period, in which he seemed to have totally lost his elegant sense of proportion and control, he threw himself into passionate readings of the New Testament, and his Marxist or liberal friends who came to visit him in the evening would find him wrapped in an enormous woman’s shawl, his demeanor feverish, his eyes those of a febrile and rapt child, and they would be forced to listen to this or that passage from the Sermon on the Mount and I don’t know how many sayings of St. Paul’s. He clung to those ancient texts, hoping to find in them salvation. He was possessed by a vague preoccupation with the brevity of human life and its precipitous pace toward the end, which is the foundation of Naples’ obstinacy, and gives it that callousness, that kind of dead fury, and in the Gospels he sought a way to forget about his hands. Once the arthritis had stabilized, however, the immediate terror and thoughts diminished, and the sacred texts went back up on a shelf. Not that he was cured, but whether it was the arrival of spring, which appeared on the sea, making it tense and brilliant, lengthening the days and causing the nights to be sweeter, or the shame of those tremors, which had made him a boy again, and which he now acknowledged were exaggerated, the young man suddenly changed. Kicking aside the chair on which he rested his injured leg, he began, with the help of a cane, to resume his visits to the radio, on Corso Umberto I, at the other end of Naples. That slight difference between one leg and the other, changing his stride and making it more difficult to walk, caused his face to twitch, which he tried to hide, and to assume that sad, careless expression that he never lost thereafter. Youth and its passions were gone. He now saw himself as a worker and viciously sought conf
irmation of this truth from every Italian, and particularly from every Neapolitan. The beautiful Marxists of the past, Lecaldano, Cotronei, and Barra, who, with the fervor of neophytes, still visited his dark apartment, hoping to win over his spirit, annoyed him and the liberals as well, and he listened to them distractedly for hours, staring at his hands or twisting a finger until it cracked. He didn’t enjoy anything anymore, had no expectations, and it was likely that nothing new would have happened for years in his disconcerting existence if, precisely during his convalescence, the star of Domenico Rea hadn’t risen rapidly, like a fireball across the night sky of Naples. Rea’s book Gesú, fate luce (Jesus, Shed Light), with a preface by the critic Francesco Flora, was published, and no one in Naples could talk about anything else.
That part of Luigi which no longer found anything to hold on to, having ripped up everything around him, and was therefore dying, was gripped by the fury and force of the pages of the author from Nocera, by their vivid and raw resurrection of the Neapolitan myth. At the same time, a deep silence, an anguish without form or voice, lodged in his mind. It wasn’t envy but a contempt that he was no longer able to express, a furious yet paralyzed melancholy. He had to like Rea, had to honor Rea, had to acknowledge Rea as the most legitimate voice in Naples. This, then, was the result of the years of a bitter and victorious fight against what he’d labeled the nullity,the Neapolitan middle class: the barefoot youth of Sud, the poor souls of Voce, many clerks, students, the restless crowd in Naples that was no longer truly Naples, and hated Naples; was no longer colorful but full of anguish and trivial thinking. The populism and naturalism that he had wished for were unexpectedly served up by Rea on a fourteenth century platter, and it was impossible for him to reject them. As had happened under Fascism, his desperate intelligence and real critical ability, roused by that irruption of antiquity, wanted to intervene, to take a stand, to oppose, but they were no longer at his command. He had to accept Rea, noting that it was useless to do otherwise, and he persisted in the game that shifted the rules, conceding all authority to the false, and stripping the truth of every right. And so it was that we witnessed this fragile revolutionary, who contained within himself both nature and a hatred of nature, by which I mean instinct and a critical ability, lavish a fiercely enthusiastic admiration on this populist Rea, whom he welcomed to his house and imposed on all his friends, spending many days with him, his wife, and his motor scooter. And when his friends, seeing his discomfort, said to him: “Come on, Luigi, Rea isn’t so great,” he would raise his cane and threaten them. He fell ill again, because of this, and became scrawny and weak. As for the author from Nocera, healthy as an ox, and very content with how his life was unfolding, he pitied Luigi, because he had a kind heart, but he also despised him, and if he spent time with him it was because he sensed in Luigi that critical faculty whose approval was infinitely important to him. But the man who welcomed him into his home was not the ancient god of whom he had heard so much and who now praised him; he was just another Neapolitan like him. And because of this, the conversations and interviews between the two of them were never real or honest, leaving Rea irked and dissatisfied and Luigi ever more neurotic and full of dark thoughts.
This was the memory I had of Luigi, and now, as an outsider, after being part of his life for so long, and having finally forgotten him, I found myself again at his door.
* ANTONIO GHIRELLI (1922-2012) was a journalist who joined the Communist Party in 1942, fought in the resistance, and, after his experiences with Sud, eventually moved to Rome and became the editor of Corriere Dello Sport. He got his start in journalism in Naples writing for the journal published by the Fascist University Group.
* “Cristo Sepolto” (Christ Interred), published in Sud in 1945, was inspired by Henry Moore’s drawings of refugees in the London underground during the German bombardments of the Second World War.
* The Bourgeois
CHIAIA: DEAD AND RESTLESS
I took my finger off the doorbell and my hand off the wall, marveling at the fact that I had been there so long (a lot of time must have passed, because the sky had turned green), and anxious to go down the steps as quickly as possible, return along Via Galiani, and take the first tram I could back to the city center. I was thinking that I could put off my visit until the following day, but in the most secret part of my soul I had determined never to set foot in that place again.
Thought and action, however, were stillborn. In a kind of inner silence, made up of aversion and concentration, I had to acknowledge that the apartment was no longer deserted. In the halflight of that room, there was now a young man in shirt-sleeves, his thin face bowed, who was looking at the door in bewilderment. Maybe he had been there for a while and I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t seen him, and he had recognized and observed me, even if not a line on his face, nothing, absolutely nothing, indicated the least interest or pleasure. I remembered that we had fought once, but that did not justify such a deadly coldness—the coldness of those who, rather than flee the world, watch it shrink and fade, and, turned to stone, do not dare to raise even a lament.
After a moment, a smile crossed that face, which was more detached and dead than that of any in Chiaia, and I saw that the young man was coming to the door, limping. He was holding a cigarette, and he flicked it away as he opened the door.
“Please, come in,” he said, continuing to smile in that way, his gaze everywhere but on me, as he held out a sweaty hand. “Sorry, my hand is sweaty. How are you?”
“Me? I’m fine.” Entering, I felt around me a horrifying atmosphere of cellars and graveyards. “Very well,” I said, rather upset.
“Anita must be in the back with the kid.”
“That’s what I thought when I saw you come in,” I said, not making much sense. “And you? How are you?”
I sat down near the large table, and I thought I shouldn’t look at him, so I turned my back. I couldn’t see him but I felt him, though more like an absence than a presence. It was as if behind my back there were an abyss, a chasm full of hands clapping, which created a desolate sound, an endless sigh. To give myself courage, I looked at the things around me, but they merely reconfirmed that subtle feeling of death, that indeterminate point in life when the unknown dimension, the silence of death, arrives. Only the gaze of those four Indians hanging on the wall was alive at that moment—but even they seemed distraught.
Since he hadn’t responded to my question, and I could hear him pacing, I thought it would be best to minimize my thoughts and my energy, to banish from my mind, or at least relegate to a tiny corner, any words related to the living world, which could only upset him. I would calm him by showing him that, owing to life’s exigencies, I, too, had been intellectually humiliated and conquered. I would have to appear cold, without strength or joy.
“Luigi,” I said, looking at the ambiguous forms of the gray print of the sofa reflected in the mirror, “I need to ask you for some information that only you can give me. That’s why I’ve come.”
“Ah, yes?” he said. “What information? I’d be glad to help. Something to do with the radio, I imagine?”
“No, nothing to do with the radio.”
He walked in front of me and went to sit in a corner of the sofa.
“So what is it then?”
Without looking at him (I could just see him in the mirror in front of me), I told him that I was planning to write something about the Neapolitan writers whom he also knew, and whose names had emerged from the hills of Naples and were heard with pleasure in Milan and Rome. In the mirror, I saw his thin, sweating face quiver and his eyes open greedily, like someone who sees something glitter in front of him. But his voice, when he spoke, was completely indifferent and calm.
“Prisco and Rea, of course.”
“And also Incoronato and La Capria.”
“I see.”
“I don’t think there’s anyone else.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“It’s for an illustr
ated weekly,” I thought I should explain. “The public adores hearing about these people. We may think it’s fatuous, but we have to consider what the public wants.”
“Yes, I agree,” he said.
The mirror seemed to have dimmed. In its surface the young Radio Naples bureaucrat now appeared slightly paler, even more hunched, and indescribably exhausted. I stopped staring at the mirror, and cautiously turned to look at him. Although it seemed impossible, in just a few minutes something had drastically changed in him. The statue who had opened the door to me was now alive and trembling. It was as if he were seeing something of enormous magnitude right in front of him. His blue eyes were lowered, and his refined face emanated an exceptional alertness. That thin, polished, beautiful face, prematurely aged by malice and boredom, was now awake and thoughtful. That seated body, slightly off balance and twisted by ill health, seemed to be losing, moment by moment, its weakness and impassivity, as if it were about to hurl itself at something. He exhibited a kind of sleepy despair. I stared at him attentively, ready for a gesture or word that, coming out of that misery, might surprise me. And so I asked him:
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